Globally, healthcare IT systems are groaning under the weight of legacy platforms. Fortunately, there is a new wave of startups entering the arena: UK startups Anima is an “enabling care” platform that works almost like a combination of Slack, Salesforce, and Figma, but for healthcare clinics and hospitals.
The company recently raised a $12 million Series A funding round led by Molten Ventures, with participation from existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Amino Collective and Y Combinator, as well as new angel investors including Sidar Sahin, founder of Peak Games.
Anima, a graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch, launched in September 2022 and is now being used in 150 NHS clinics in England. The startup’s software allows clinic staff to process and submit healthcare documents, but adds a higher degree of automation compared to legacy systems.
“Anima can take a specific medical history, autonomously, for each presenting complaint and present it to the clinic with possible differential diagnoses and suggested next steps, ensuring that red flags are not missed,” Shun Pang, Co-Founder and CEO of Anima. he told TechCrunch. “The entire clinic collaborates on a real-time multiplayer dashboard like Figma, and can ping each other and chat with a Slack-like UX.” he said.
He also added that Anima’s processing system can “autonomously ingest any document, such as manuscripts, diagrams, visualization and produce an abstract, with structured fields.”
Competitors in this space include UK-based accuRx, which is post-Series B and has raised £36.6m to date. In the US, Memora Health has raised $80.5 million and NexHealth, which is post-Series C, has raised $177.2 million to date.
Pang told me, “We see our real competitors as any company with a credible path to a ‘care enabler’ platform that captures the clinical workflow from ingestion to resolution, similar to what Rippling did for HR or Salesforce for distribution.”
He’s also somewhat of an unusual founder in this space, having been a practicing physician before this startup: “I’m doubly techie. I trained as a doctor at Cambridge and am a self-taught software engineer who wrote much of the code for Anima. I was essentially building what I wanted and knew would save lives.”
Given its traction and founding hinterland, Anima has been able to make encouraging inroads into the NHS, which is said to be very difficult to deal with.
Inga Deakin, director of Molten Ventures, said in a statement: “Software and artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is a rapidly growing multi-billion dollar field, but many solutions take time to integrate and realize their potential… Anima is growing fast, because they can have an immediate and immediate impact.”
